The Administration didn’t publicize this part of the President’s nasty work, but the now dead 2007 Bush order explicitly required funding for “alternative methods” of stem cell researchsuch as the new induced pluripotent stem cells (IPSC), a process that changes skin or other cells such as hair follicles into pluripotent stem cells without making or destroying embryos. IPSCs offer so much promiseand all without the ethical contentiousness of human cloning and embryonic stem cell research. Indeed, these alternative methods are one of the few areas in which people who are pro-life and pro-choice, conservative and liberal, pro and anti-ESCR can agree upon, the very type of policy that this president said he wanted to pursue.

I can think of only two reasons for this unwarranted action, for which I saw no advocacy either during the election or in the first weeks of the Administration: First, vindictiveness against all things “Bush” or policies considered by the Left to be “pro-life”; and second, a desire to get the public to view unborn human life as a mere crop ripe for the harvest. Wait, there’s a third potential reason: both of the above.